The Buzz: Friday the 13th Weird Science

Today is Friday the 13th, and things are getting a little bit weird here at ScienceBlogs. I mean, birds wearing backpacks? The possibility of a Neandertal genome sequenced? Scicurious talking about co... oh wait, that's actually pretty normal. If we were superstitious though, we might think there was something to all of this.

More like this

Last week, we decided to compare a human mitochondrial DNA sequence with the mitochondrial sequences of our cousins, the apes, and find out how similar these sequences really are. The answer is: really, really, similar. And you can see that, in the BLAST graph, below the fold. A quick glance…
This Friday the 13th, I'll be sleeping in, then getting some work done, and hopefully taking it easy in the evening. It wasn't always so. Back in college I used to party on these days, making a point of floutting all kinds of hoary old superstitions, and (at least theoretically) buying myself an…
This week, Science published two papers about the genetics of Neandertals from a team of scientists based at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology. The first (which is the only one anyone seems to really care about) gives a draft version of the entire Neandertal genome - a whopping…
I've railed against the rise of supplemental data and methods before, but, having just reviewed a paper where I spent more time reading the supplemental sections versus the actual fucking paper, what Scicurious wrote struck a chord with me: Sci wishes she could make her own flowchart of…